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January 25 - February 12, 2023
Plato, especially, has no external biography. If he had lover, wife, or children, we hear nothing of them. He ground them all into paint.
What is the Socratic method for? It lets us see something else more clearly: the workings and failings of the mind and its productions.
Intellectus sibi permissus means “the mind left to itself.” It is an expression that had been used a lot by Francis Bacon, and it is a good way to explain why the Socratic method is helpful. The mind left to itself tends toward irrationality and idiocy. The Socratic method improves its performance.
First, it proceeds by question and answer. Some of the questions are open-ended, as when Socrates asks Laches to propose a definition. At other points Socrates asks whether his partners agree with what he has said. Regardless, the result isn’t a lecture and isn’t quite an argument, either. Socrates gets his partners to consent to every step he takes.
Second, Socrates is always focused on the consistency of his partners. He probes it with a device known as the elenchus.
Third, his questions identify the principle behind what his partners are saying. Then he shows that the principle doesn’t cover things that it should, or that it does cover things that it shouldn’t.
Fourth, Socrates uses concrete examples to drive his reasoning: soldiers running away, someone playing a lyre, doctors and their patients. The examples often involve everyday people and situations. Sometimes the everyday examples illustrate big conceptual points. Sometimes he uses them to build analogies between things that are familiar and things that aren’t. One way or another, he tries to make headway on large issues by talking about specific cases that are easy to imagine.
Fifth, Socrates doesn’t claim expertise. He confesses his own ignorance, and that is where the dialogue ends: at an impasse, and without an answer.
The consistency he wants is between the different things you claim to think at any given time. To put it more practically, Socrates starts with whatever you say—call it X. Then he gets you to admit that you also believe Y. Then he causes you to see for yourself that X and Y are inconsistent. Neither has been proven wrong, but at least one of them must be. Since you can’t believe both, you’re forced to change one or the other. So Socrates isn’t your antagonist; he’s the one who shows you that you are your own antagonist.
And a failure to think Socratically, in the sense just described, is at the root of most of what’s foolish and infuriating in our ethical and political culture. People routinely say things that they don’t really believe, or wouldn’t believe if they thought longer about it. By “wouldn’t believe,” I mean that what they say isn’t consistent with other things they believe more deeply. Or they wouldn’t say it if the facts were changed in ways that they think should be irrelevant.
It may be a perspective from which the chase after the truth is seen to be the highest human pursuit even if (or perhaps because) the complete capture of that truth is not possible. A reader sometimes is brought to such a perspective more effectively by taking part in an exhausting and failed chase rather than by being told to adopt the perspective directly.
The Socratic method doesn’t replace your current opinions with better ones. It changes your relationship to your opinions. It replaces the love of holding them with the love of testing them.
A question puts pressure on whoever receives it. If you ask questions of yourself, you are the recipient of the pressure. That’s good. Stating an opinion is roughly the opposite. It releases pressure. Pressure is uncomfortable, so most people think and talk in opinions.
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Small questions also are good because they slow everything down. This matters in part just because the truth tends to be complicated. Complexity can’t be seen in a hurry. Really understanding an argument—why someone would think this or that, and whether it holds up—is like taking apart a machine and putting it back together.
The legal scholar John Wigmore called cross-examination “the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth.”
The rules in court and in a Socratic dialogue are similar in many ways. First, all questions have to be answered as long as they aren’t out of order. You can’t say “I’d rather not say.” Second, the witness in court is supposed to tell the truth, and that is a rule in Socratic inquiry, too: say what you think. (See chapter 10.) Third, the interrogator can ask leading questions—in other words, questions that imply their answers: “Isn’t it true that … ? Wouldn’t you agree that … ?” Leading questions leave no room for answers that evade. They force the witness to confront the point.
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That’s how Socrates does it: he takes his time and asks easy questions until he understands exactly what is being said. Then comes the cross.
Socratic questioning gives you a more intelligent understanding of a subject. It makes you reach conclusions more slowly and puts a brake on many kinds of foolishness. But in return you give up the satisfaction of easily knowing what you think and usually feeling certain that you are right. This is the Socratic trade, and it involves a risk. Instead of being sure of too much, you might be sure of too little.
The Socratic trade seems most worrisome when it’s not made symmetrically by both sides to a dispute. We all wish the trade were made more often—by our adversaries. But people naturally fear that if they ask hard questions and their enemies don’t, the enemies will always win. It looks like unilateral disarmament.
But here’s what the term is most commonly said to mean: You make a claim. Socrates gets you to agree to some other proposition. Then he shows, sometimes surprisingly, that the new point to which you’ve agreed is inconsistent with what you said before. In short, he causes you to contradict yourself.
Elenchus
Notice that Socrates uses questions to get the agreement of his partner at every step. Didn’t you say this, and don’t you also think that—and don’t they conflict? This matters because it means, when the final result arrives, that Laches has contradicted himself rather than being contradicted by Socrates. He has full ownership of the problem.
Fear of what other people will say and think, as such, has no rightful place in moral reasoning so far as Socrates is concerned. To the contrary, it is a threat to the project of honest inquiry and has to be firmly kept away from the process.
It is the fashion of the present time to disparage negative logic—that which points out weaknesses in theory or errors in practice, without establishing positive truths. Such negative criticism would indeed be poor enough as an ultimate result; but as a means to attaining any positive knowledge or conviction worthy the name, it cannot be valued too highly; and until people are again systematically trained to it, there will be few great thinkers, and a low general average of intellect, in any but the mathematical and physical departments of speculation.
As a proposition holds up under different conditions, confidence in it rises. The elenchus thus becomes a device for finding truth, not just refuting what others say. It can produce cumulative consistency.
In this way the elenchus helps along the formation of the self. It causes you to figure out what your moral conscience is made of. There is a conflict in your views; you have to decide which to keep and which to drop. It is like an inner tournament with winning and losing ideas. You understand yourself better after many rounds of it.17 The Socratic method thus helps toward fulfillment of the instruction inscribed over the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: know thyself.
The Socratic method, in its classic form, consists of internal critique. It tests whether you’re being consistent with yourself and believe all that you think you do. Socrates doesn’t tell you that you’re wrong; he shows you that you think you’re wrong.
Refuting a claim generally means showing that it’s inconsistent with something—with the facts, or with logical rules, or with other things you say. This last type of inconsistency is the one Socrates most likes to use, and it’s distinctly convincing. If someone shows that your views are in conflict with new information, you might doubt the data. When your beliefs are in conflict with each other, it’s uncomfortable in a more direct way. You can’t attack the author of the study.
Sometimes inconsistencies of other kinds can survive without trouble, which is usually to say that they might not really be inconsistencies after all. It’s entirely possible, for example, for two policies to seem inconsistent but be rationally favored by the same person. Together the policies might represent a reasoned compromise between different interests.
Second, consistent claims (or any other claims) may not be necessary to support a given view. Sometimes—maybe often—we might hold moral beliefs on grounds that owe nothing to reason at all.
The problem of consistency arises for Socratic purposes, rather, when you articulate two beliefs that can’t both be right. You’re trying to reason about a question. You want to say true things about it, but it’s hard to get them aligned. It’s like a balance sheet where the numbers come out wrong. Something is amiss. If you don’t care, that’s your business—but if you don’t care, why are you using a balance sheet?
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The majority of mankind would need to be much better cultivated than has ever yet been the case, before they can be asked to place such reliance in their own power of estimating arguments, as to give up practical principles in which they have been born and bred and which are the basis of much of the existing order of the world, at the first argumentative attack which they are not capable of logically resisting.
Benefit of tradition
People shouldn’t be too quick to give up their way of life just because someone has made an argument they don’t know how to answer. Maybe their old custom has more sense in it than the new argument does, and they aren’t good at arguing.
Chestertons fence
The Socratic method makes constant use of two operations of the mind. The first is seeing similarities between things that look different. The second is seeing differences between things that look similar.
He argues in the Protagoras that wisdom and moderation must be the same. Why? Because different things can’t have the same opposite, and the opposite of wisdom and the opposite of moderation are the same: foolishness.
The example shows the value of hypothetical cases in Socratic questioning. You can make them extreme in ways that go right to the point and that cause everyone to agree. They may take ingenuity to devise, but they don’t have to be realistic. They just need to show that a principle leads someplace where its author might not want to go.
These analogies are, among other things, tools for clarification. Socrates uses them to help along his partner’s understanding without the need for an abstract explanation. Analogies work in part because we often can see and feel the force of a comparison before we can explain why (or even if we can’t explain why). They show rather than tell. Instead of saying “be more general,” Socrates talks in examples and says “do it like this.”
This style of inquiry is a good example of how Socrates reasons about hard and unfamiliar things by starting with easy and familiar ones. Begin with what you know—with distinctions and examples that you’re sure about. Then try to map them onto the problems that you aren’t so sure about. See where the fit is easy and where it’s hard, and ask why. If someone is struggling to give the kind of answer that you’re hoping to talk about, show what that kind of answer would look like in a setting where it’s easy to understand.
Notice that an analogy like this doesn’t prove anything. The fact that knowledge resembles food in some ways doesn’t mean that it resembles it in others. But the claim seems more convincing as the parallels get more numerous and vivid. Vividness isn’t an argument, but it functions like one and can feel as persuasive or more. That should make us wary of vividness, but also mindful of its uses.
This example shows how an analogy, once established, can be turned to make a clinching point. These two things are alike in many ways, yes, but then they differ in this final way.
Clarity can also be improved by offering a choice between analogies: is the subject better compared to this or that? If two things are alike (or different), is it in this way or that way?
The analogy adds force because the parallel is vivid and ties the abstract claim to things that everyone has experienced with the senses. The analogy operates on the listener’s intuitions; that is, it plays to the organs of perception rather than reason. The analogy also lets insults be heaped on the subject indirectly. Socrates uses harsh words when he talks about cosmetics: “knavish, false, ignoble, illiberal.” That’s safe enough; there are no cosmeticians around to complain. But once the repulsive character of cosmetics is established, those words can be transferred to rhetoric without too
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It’s a reminder that analogies look like observations but actually make claims. Keeping the claim below the surface can make it more effective because no direct examination of it is invited. The question asks the partner to assume the truth of the parallel and to finish it; asking whether there is a parallel would be different and might lead to a different discussion.
He draws comparisons to everyday things and activities—to cobblers and clay. These images give relief from abstraction and create some comfort.
Think of Socrates as up against a bias: we treat what is available to our senses more seriously than what is only available to our minds. He is at war with that bias. Analogies are a weapon against it.
A lot of the action in Socratic moral reasoning happens in that bottom-up fashion: Is a given case more like this one or that one? What can we gather from the things we know? Socrates seeks agreement to simple claims, then leverages the agreement into big claims.
trying to find the truth, rather than trying to win; examining people, not just claims; judging arguments on their merits regardless of who makes them; candor, or saying what you think; the one-witness principle—that is, treating the other party to the dialogue as the judge of what it has shown; the principle of charity; and not giving or taking offense.
So far as Socrates is concerned, the value of an argument is independent of the identity of the person making it. That is why he will talk to anyone and listen to anyone. He is ready to refute what is said by the mighty, and he will accept refutation from any source so long as the reasoning is sound.
The internal consistency of someone who makes a claim is a central focus of the method. In other words, Socrates cares whether their claims are consistent with one another. But the identity of the person making a claim is irrelevant to the analysis.
Identity
Candor. Another rule of Socratic dialogue: say what you think, not what others want to hear.
The honest claim will be challenged and probed, but the maker of the claim will not be condemned. Quite the contrary: one who says something shocking should be thanked for putting the claim on the table so that it can be rationally talked about and tested. The act of doing so is a personal risk taken in part for the good of the community. Other people are probably having the same thought but not saying so. And the unspoken thing might be closer to the truth than the thing spoken.
